Whistler's Slopes Hit Google Street View For Olympics 2010

In advance of the 2010 Winter Olympics, which kick off Friday, February 12 in Vancouver B.C., Google has mapped the slopes of Whistler on Google Street View.

Google traded in its Street View car for a Street View Snowmobile that crawled the mountain snapping pictures of the slopes. The digital imagery has been stitched together to provide users with 360-degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical panoramic views of skiers, lifts, gondolas, and more.

How were we able to gather imagery at 7,000 feet (2,000 meters)? The Street View team's constant experimenting yielded a snowmobile decked out with cameras to capture slope-level imagery of several runs on Whistler Blackcomb Mountains.

We've picked out some of the best, most impressive Street View shots of Whistler in the slideshow below. Check them out, then play in the 'snow' on Whistler through Google Street View.

The video below, from Google, explains in more detail how the Google Street View snowmobile did its job.